I have always held a fascination with speech recognition technology. Ever since experimenting with it in early versions of Microsoft Office, I’m regularly enthusiastic about trying a new dictation application. Unfortunately, they rarely meet my expectations. Commonly, I will experiment with one for a few days before it quickly becomes redundant. Speech recognition is a complex technology, and one very difficult to perfect.

MacSpeech Dictate is undoubtedly the leading speech recognition application for the Mac, designed for the platform from the ground up. At $200 it certainly doesn’t come cheap, but offers an incredibly powerful feature set and arrives bundled with a high-quality, noise canceling microphone headset.

This review will assess the quality of speech recognition in MacSpeech Dictate, take a look at the features on offer, and outline how it is capable of controlling your Mac.